Nancy W.
Yelp
I'll start by stating that I love this winery, and have been a long time customer (including their Axebridge Minneapolis location when that existed). I've also been a past wine club member, and we make several trips to the winery a year, including some of their premier events, such as the Bonfire event in the fall. With excitement, I attended the soft opening of their new "Bonfire and Barrel" space at the winery today. If I were to rate the space just on the winery/new space it would be a 4 or 4.5 rating; if I were to include the food it would be a 2 or 3 rating. I love that they've added a brand new space with seating for dining, wine tastings, and a bar with mixed drinks / beer. I've always felt that the indoor space was lacking nooks and crannies for imbibing and conversing comfortably with others, and I wish they had leaned into that idea more. I welcome what they did with the new space, but there's really only space for 4-5 small groups to relax in comfortable seating around the firespace; so of you are one of the lucky ones to score a primo spot, you will have a great experience. Everyone else will have a better experience than they did in the old space, but not as great as it could have been. The space does have an industrial feel a bit with the concrete floors. If the space is full, the acoustics will make an intimate conversational experience a challenge. The sound system playing music in the new space was really inferior, and I do wish that were higher quality (but that may not be as important to everyone). My real criticism is the food. We came early (2:30 on a Friday), and ordered a pizza. The undercarriage of the pepperoni pizza we ordered managed to be almost burned on the bottom, but raw in the middle through all of the crust. And the sauce was awful....it tasted like tomato paste. At $27 for a large pizza, I expect a properly executed wood fired pizza, not raw. This is the second time this has happened to us, so I don't think we will order a pizza a third time, which is a shame since sometimes you really want food with your cocktail. The other food choices really weren't as appealing as the ones that were on the Axebridge menu (their sister winery in Minneapolis that had full dining before it closed). Note: we ordered a large pizza, but they were out of large pizza dough and they substituted two small pizzas instead (which probably worked out better for us, but for the raw pizza dough aspect of the meal). Our outing at the new space for a bottle of wine/large pizza/tip was almost $100. At that price, I expect food that is tasty and well cooked, not expensive and nearly raw. The server we had was pleasant and welcoming, and properly attentive. The winery has ample parking. The location in Waconia is almost an hour travel time, so this is a planned outing for us. It pains me to ding them at all, because I like what they did, but it could have been better.